The Abel Conference is an annual conference series that honors the Abel Prize Laureates. It is a collaboration between the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters named Endre Szemerédi the 2012 recipient of the Abel Prize "for his fundamental contributions to discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science, and in recognition of the profound and lasting impact of these contributions on additive number theory and ergodic theory." The prize carries a monetary award of approximately one million U.S. dollars.

Szemerédi is a permanent research fellow at the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in Budapest. He also serves as the New Jersey professor of computer science at Rutgers University.